In exchange for the earrings, that sweaty guy who worked at the Port Authority had given her a half dozen ration coupons; for Sister Cecilia, she’d gotten one of the rarest, most expensive items on the island—four boxes of morphine. The doctors had already used up two of those boxes. Lucia wondered what would happen when the nun’s meager allotment of analgesics ran out.
That wasn’t the only problem. The doctor said Sister Cecilia badly needed a drug called mannitol to reduce the swelling in her brain, but the medical board had ruled that her friend was a lost cause and precious vials of mannitol would be wasted on her. But Lucia didn’t lose hope.
She’d been walking for twenty minutes when the driver of an overcrowded bus with a ridiculous-looking fuel tank bolted to the roof took pity on Lucia’s group and picked them up. At a little past one, the girl finally arrived at the hospital.
Health services had totally collapsed. There were five hundred physicians on the island at most, and that number included med students from the University of La Laguna whom authorities had rushed to graduate.
In the lobby was an endless flow of patients, medical staff, and people claiming they had the most ridiculous ailments. Being admitted to the hospital guaranteed three meals daily and a break from the oppressive Mandatory Labor Service for a few days. Every day, exhausted doctors weeded out the fakers from among the genuinely sick.
She entered through the employee entrance, nodding at the armed guards manning the metal detector. With a quick, practiced gesture, she pinned her badge to her lapel. The guards knew her and gave her a quick glance, then turned their attention back to the relentless stream of people trying to finagle their way in. Security was no laughing matter at the island’s only functioning hospital. There’d been several attempts to rob the pharmacy. On the black market, medications were the most valuable currency.
“Hi, Lucia!” The nurses’ aide who greeted her was a real pistol, barely five feet tall. She was making eyes at one of the guards as she pinned her ID to the neckline of a blouse that was better suited for a bar than a hospital.
“Hi, Maite! How’s it going?” With a knowing smile, Lucia walked up to the girl she considered her good friend. They’d only known each other a couple of weeks but survivors made friends amazingly easily. Those who’d emerged from that Undead hell desperately needed to interact with other people to feel alive.
“Great!” Maite replied with a mischievous grin. “Fernando’s taking me out to dinner tonight. We may even have some wine! He’s got some special ration coupons.”
“Fernando…who the hell’s Fernando?” Lucia asked, but one glance at the guard and the starry-eyed look on Maite’s face explained everything. She shook her head. Her friend had a new boyfriend every week. They all promised the eternal love Maite was so desperate for. Of course there’d be a new guy the next week, but that didn’t matter.
Life goes on, Lucia thought as she pulled on her uniform in the locker room and listened to her friend chatter away. Despite all the shit we’ve been through, we still fall in love and have dreams. Even living the way we are, we survivors are fairly happy. Incredible, but true. Our will to live is so strong.
“… Cecilia?”
“What’d you say, Maite?” Lucia abruptly turned from her thoughts.
“I asked you if there’d been any change in your friend’s status.”
Lucia thought for a moment, with a bitter look on her face. “No change. I’m going to go see her before my shift.” She wanted to say, No fucking change. She’ll probably be a vegetable forever, but I can’t accept that. If I did, I’d start to lose her and I’m sick of losing the people I love, but she checked herself and forced a smile, as she took Maite’s hand in hers and made a pouty face. “Will you come with me? Please?”
“Sure,” said Maite. “First let’s swing by the nurses’ station and get some of that crap they call coffee, okay?” Maite gave Lucia a loving hug and walked out of the room, not knowing that in less than half an hour, she’d be dead.
27
Madrid was dead.
There was no one left in a city where almost six million people once lived, breathed and dreamed. Nobody, except Them.
The metropolis extended for miles; not a sound broke the silence. The SuperPuma flew really low over streets and plazas as it crossed the city at top speed. Prit said we’d be less visible that way since the engine noise would ricochet, making it harder for those monsters to locate its source.
Passing so close to those rooftops made me extremely nervous, especially in such an unreliable helicopter. Everywhere the scene was the same: wide, empty streets; here and there a vehicle lying across the road. Trash, broken glass and worm-eaten skeletons were everywhere.
Retiro Park, located in the heart of Madrid, had once been a showcase. Now it had become a jungle. Weeds had devoured its walking paths. Its little lake gleamed in the sun, almost buried under tons of algae that gave it a greenish cast. On the lake’s banks, the Crystal Palace was just a skeleton of steel beams and broken glass.
La Castellana, the main thoroughfare through the heart of the city, looked ghostly. Massive clouds of dirt rolled down that ten-lane road, rattling the few streetlights still standing. It was completely free of cars, since it had been closed to traffic right before the final collapse. A lone Volvo SUV with bars on its windows looked out of place on that deserted avenue. Why had its driver stopped in the middle of nowhere?
Here and there we spotted mounds of mummies and decaying skeletons where defense forces had taken a stand against the Undead. In every case, those mounds were surrounded by empty, shiny copper shell casings. Unfortunately, all those dead Undead were just a drop in the vast ocean of Undead that infested the streets.
It was a chilling sight. Sidewalks and roads were crawling with thousands of those creatures who were stopped in their tracks as if in a trance. It was like looking at an aerial photo of a street, frozen in a moment of normal city life. But the crowd’s torn, blood-stained clothes destroyed that illusion—those who still had clothes, that is.
Only when the noise of the propeller blades and the shadow of our helicopter passed over them did the Undead awaken out of their trances.
“Look over there!” Broto shouted in disbelief, pointing to a spot on the ground.
We were passing by Santiago Bernabeu Soccer Stadium. Heavy vehicles and huge, steel, industrial containers blocked all the entrances. The number of worm-eaten bodies littering the sidewalks around the stadium was even greater here. Scaffolding ran halfway up the south facade, connecting two open holes in the side of the stadium, but none of us understood why.
Clearly large crowds had mounted a resistance there, but the stadium was deserted now. Tumbled-down shacks lined the bleachers, and torn plastic bags were caught on rusted iron poles and floated in the air like ghosts. The grass playing field was a vast quagmire; dozens of small irregular lumps covered more than half of it. In a corner, where goal posts should’ve been, someone had spelled out HELP with seats ripped from the bleachers.
“What the hell’re those mounds?” I asked pointing to the lumps in the grass.
“Graves,” Marcelo muttered grimly. “It’s a graveyard.”